Quote:
Originally Posted by milomilo
Fine with me. Scrap all the ultra loss making rural routes, scrap the Canadian and scrap the Ocean and scrap all the shite equipment needed to service those routes. Buy new equipment and focus efforts on the populated areas of Southern Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, BC and Alberta.
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I wonder how much investment would be needed to get the speed along, say, the Vancouver-Calgary route up to 200 km/h on average. The mountains make this route more challenging than normal but if it were flat it would be a very reasonable route. It's about 1,000 km and serves around 5 million people, with some smaller destinations in the middle (Merritt, Kamloops, Salmon Arm, national parks). Vancouver-Calgary flights are only about 1:20 but when you factor in travel to the airports and time wasted at the airports it is more like a 4 hour trip. A comfortable 6 hour train with wifi would be, I'd imagine, attractive to many travelers.
I would guess that an incremental concerted effort to improve the rail routes over the years would produce big dividends in a decade or two. Make a list of the hundreds of small improvements that are possible, tackle a few a year, and the gains will add up. For example I wonder how much trains have to slow down here in metro Vancouver because of all the at-grade crossings.
Something else to note is that the trains tend to do better in winter conditions. In the winter, the train could be much more reliable than the highways. Air travel is also very weather dependent. We just accept that every winter there are periods when it's hard to travel around large chunks of Canada.
The Ocean route is a good example of weird federal spending that gets people moaning about subsidies yet provides little to no benefit for the Maritimes.
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